Joseph Campbell said that in the Western world we have both the freedom and the obligation of finding out what our destiny is.

How do we discover how to live our own particular personal myth, while at the same time living in the midst of the mundane things of our everyday world? How can we ever learn to bring a deeper awareness to matters that lie beyond all the things of this world that pre-occupy us, and demand our immediate attention?

How do we find the space and time to take up an authentic search for meaning and self awakening – and exactly what lies in our way of doing so?

How many of us have become so over-attached to the security of what is familiar, of how we are to be provided for, that we’ve lost our instinctual sense of venturing? How many of us have become too afraid to take new risks, or to keep on with renewing ourselves, that we have given up our explorations of the ‘as-yet-unknown-ness’ of this world?

Or is it just that are we simply avoidant by our human nature, seeking self-preservation primarily, and forsaking a certain kind of fundamental ‘leave-taking’ for the confinement of the couch, for the refuge of personal comfort, for the protective sanctity of home

In what ways have you grown accustomed to the status quo in your life? How do you now cling to all that is familiar to you, so you don’t have to ever really go forth and head out into the world in every-evolving ways?

In his book Pathways to Bliss, Campbell poses these questions: “What is the great thing for which you would sacrifice your life? What makes you do what you do? What is the call of your life to you – do you know it?”

He goes on to say, “a person who is truly gripped by a calling, by a dedication or a belief, by a certain zeal, will sacrifice his (or her) security, personal relationships, prestige. He (or she) will give themselves entirely to their personal myth”.

Campbell also acknowledges, “it is not always easy or possible to know by what it is that we are seized”. But it does require us to increase our capacity for fascination and rapture, and lessen our sense of rumination and threat, upon the arrival of some kind of worthwhile life dilemma or mystery.

What is that semi-conscious, flickering, intangible thing that elicits a peculiar feeling in us, a compelling inner ‘pull’ towards certain places, activities or yearnings?

What is that familiar yet ungraspable and subtle sense of awakening we feel in certain life circumstances or settings, such as when we are in nature? How is it that we find ourselves, again and again, caught in repetitive, fated patterns or situations? How do certain troubles or problems seem to always cleave to us, in ways that our personalities then have to keep confronting, exploring, and eventually, resolving?

We are often haunted by this ongoing interplay of fate and destiny in our lives. We find ourselves wondering what our true place is in the physical universe; we seek to know our life’s meaning and our purpose in it; we long for a vital connection to something larger than ourselves. But these matters are rarely resolved in the terrain of our familiar, pre-ordained life course.

In order to adhere to an inner call to adventure, we have two fundamental and complimentary tasks laid before us: leaving home and venturing into an unknown world. We have to loosen our grip on much that is familiar, while turning our compass heading towards the unfamiliar, and assess the various elements of risk that must be undertaken as we make our way through the realm of the unknown.

To support our understanding of this call to adventure, let’s turn our attention to one of Mary Oliver’s most well-known poems, appropriated titled The Journey:

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began

This poem’s beginning implies the end of something else. One day. Before that day arrived, there were all the days before that it took, everything that had to be gone through, things that had to be endlessly repeated or endured, before you finally knew what you had to do.

Needless to say, this can take up many years, or perhaps even most of a lifetime, or at least it can feel that way. All that had to be or to be refused, all that had to be lived or not lived, before the ‘one day’ that reached critical mass and suddenly stood out among all the others, and arrived.

Sometimes, we must first wade through our fears, confusions, doubts, and defeating sense of despair. For others, it must be travels through ambiguity, emptiness, trepidation and numbness. Yet others, it is feeling failure and fogginess, or chronic low-level anxiety and listlessness – or some other combination of the aforementioned.

These are the many different negative and apparently necessary facets of our existence that can stem from a common denominator: some form of not knowing how to be. As well, there is the not knowing what to do.

The introduction of this poem begins like the first words (actually, the third verse) from The Book of Genesis in the Bible: “And then there was light.” But exactly what preceded ‘In the beginning’, and how long did that take? What was really going on in the creation of this world, before the light came on? What was happening in that void of universal darkness?

This takes us once again back to the unknowable, the unknown. On a true hero’s journey, all roads eventually and mythically lead us here.

Rumi speaks of this in the beginning of the Coleman Barks’ rendition of Who Says Words With My Mouth?

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.

Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?

I have no idea.

My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,

and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.

This drunkenness, this lack of clarity of vision and purpose, it began somewhere else. Even the mystics will often wisely state they have no idea. Perhaps the difference between those mystics and us is their lack of knowing likely troubles them less, or at least differently. Perhaps they even ultimately aim for that place.

When we are troubled by our unknowing, we are prone to become restless and anxious. When we become bound to anxiety, we are less and less able to listen inwardly or deeply. And when we can’t listen within ourselves, we can’t hear what calls to us.

What matters keep us from listening for what speaks to us from within? I have been occupied by a great deal of wondering about this very thing. I have come to the sobering conclusion that many of us are often unwilling to do what it takes to get close enough to ourselves, and deep enough within ourselves, to really listen.

Or to just listen to and find peace within the silence we can find within. Yet this quieting inner descent and space making is what we each need, so that we become more able to listen to what is down there in the depths, waiting to surface and be heard.

For those of us willing and able to arrive at a quiet, centered, still place inside, we may be looking and listening for something in particular. We are sometimes searching for the projection of our ego’s wishes. Joseph Campbell says, “One way to deprive yourself of an experience is indeed to expect it. Another is to have a name for it before you have the experience.”

Thus, we are unable to hear or sense what is actually arriving to make itself known within our interior world. We are too pre-occupied and familiarized with fantasies created by our own ego wishes and projections, which are born from our deficits. We find ourselves looking for perfect match for our fantasies, and in the process, we are in danger of losing sight of everything else that comes our way instead.

Some of us have been unconsciously looking to have our inner call to adventure magically provided for us, in the way and form our desire can demand. We want a calling that comes pre-packaged and all at once, with a ‘literalness’ that we can confuse with clarity: Actual voices or particular beings, delivering a deciphered message word by word; or a vision that must look a certain way, with everything we need to do clearly spelled out for us. This type of calling, if it is a calling at all, is the exception and not the norm.

Sometimes, we naively wish for our interior world to look and sound just like our exterior world. We become ‘fundamentalists’ of the soul – we make the mistake of taking our dreams, imaginings, and inner calls all too concretely, too historically, or too literally. We fail to see the mythic or metaphorical energies underneath it all, that which drives the psyche’s creation of the symbols, images and words we sense within us.

If we are to listen deeply to an inner call to adventure, we have to learn to accept the initial and more subtle, dreamlike states of awareness that come; we pay closer attention to occurrences in our night dreams; we have an informative regard for our creative imaginings during guided meditations or creative visualizations.

From there, we still have to do the inner work of the meaning-making that happens underneath the symbols, stories, people or words we encounter and are captured by. The hero’s adventure always begins with deep listening to the call of the soul heard by the ego to allow an adventure to take place – and the soul, most of the time, is a subtle herald.

We then come to appreciate that the call to adventure is often very gentle; it is fleeting and flickering, especially at first. It’s when we don’t listen closely that the message or the messenger comes knocking much louder, and sometimes comes with a blunt thud.

So the paradox here is that once we can accept the condition of our not knowing, we can open up a space inside to begin paying attention to notice more deeply, and more subtly. Then we can even start orienting ourselves to what is actually already there.

This is a different way of being, one in which we shift from a searching consciousness, which is needed to get started on the journey, to that of a finding consciousness, which instead explores the deeper terrains of where one already and currently is located within their interior.

Inevitably, when we arrive at the unknown aspects of the self, this will feel foreign or even alien to us, at first. We find ourselves encountered a troubling “not me” feeling. There is no way around this when we enter unknown territory within us, just many ways to avoid these spaces within.

Going from searching to finding is helped along by a neutral and open transition space within the self. I refer to this open, unrecognized, or unrealized space as not-yet-ness. It implies that from an accepting and open point of view, something will inevitably happen, even though it has not yet happened. This is a crucial shift in conscious one has to make for a meaningful soul journey.

If we can only take up the waiting we have to do more positively and more actively – with a curiosity, and even a sense of play – something will inevitably begin to happen that hasn’t happened thus far. This is because something is already happening, and we have not yet become aware of its happening.

Tom Petty conveys this common struggle in his rock song ‘The Waiting’, when he wails out the refrain, “the waiting is the hardest part!” As a modern culture, we are less and less inclined to wait for anything anymore, perhaps mostly because we often no longer have to.

Our modern culture is built upon the notion as well as the function of speed. But speed doesn’t often help with the hero’s venturing, especially as it applies to wandering. On the soul’s journey, active waiting is a necessary skill that must be cultivated and practiced over and over, especially to support a gradual realization of one’s destiny.

I am reminded of a humorous story in this regard, one that took place during a men’s Hero’s Journey wilderness intensive some years back. A member of our stewarding team ventured out for a day of solitude, and went out for a solitary exercise we call a ‘Medicine Walk’.

His intention was to cultivate more patience for himself; he wanted to learn how to better wait. As it was a hot, sunny summer day, he had taken along an umbrella along. He also had with him an old briefcase, curiously filled with carving knives, so he could whittle away at some wooden sticks when he felt so inclined, while waiting. But he mostly intended to practice standing in one spot for a long time.

As the day grew long, and in the intense heat of a sunny, mid-summer’s afternoon, I myself was on a solitary walk. I was slowly meandering between green, thick forests and bright, open meadows near our base camp, high up in the West Virginia mountains. I suddenly became aware of this peculiar figure up ahead in the dramatic landscape, standing in a wide-open field, amidst wildflowers.

I could see that his umbrella was up, shading him from the fierceness of the sun’s rays. He was wearing a straw hat, a colorful Hawaiian shirt, and a pair of shorts. As I slowly approached, I realized that his boots were set aside, and his feet were buried in sandy earth. This was indeed a strange and peculiar sight, and it added greatly to the impression that he’d been standing in one spot for a very, very long time.

Beside him was his battered briefcase, standing upright as well. It gave the appearance of a man standing at a bus stop, waiting for the next bus. Yet here he was, in the middle of a wildflower field in a mountainous meadow, many miles from anything resembling a bus stop.

In the spirit of play, I kept a stiff upper lip and sober demeanor, and walked right by him. I said only one thing to him as I passed. “Waiting for the bus?” His reply had me bending over with belly laughs. “No,” he said, “I’m waiting for the road!”

See if you can feel what happens within you when you reflect on the following question from two differing internal perspectives:

Have you found that thing that brings you utterly alive on the inside?

No. Feel what happens internally with that response. Not yet. What is the difference internally with this response?

Going from ‘no’ to ‘not yet’ brings a sense of possibility forward; it makes the challenge of venturing into the unknown somehow more feasible; it allows for unrealized things to become more interesting. Not yet implies that something’s coming eventually, that isn’t guaranteed.

This openness in attitude can help position us towards the possible, so when something fleeting yet un-ignorable starts to happen within us, we may be able to respond to this essential question – “Have you found that thing that brings you utterly alive on the inside?” – with a Yes!

Perhaps a humbling thing to realize, whenever we find ourselves agitated or distraught about not knowing something, is that not knowing can actually be an unconscious defense against knowing. Has this ever occurred to you about your own not knowing?

Searching is often the easy part of the journey, precisely because something has not yet been found. Sometimes, it is in the finding that the spirit of adventure brings forth the inevitable ordeal.

In the movie No Country for Old Men, Tommy Lee Jones plays a sheriff who has come upon a gruesome murder scene somewhere in the isolated, brown and lonely Texas plains – evidence of a drug deal gone bad, very bad. Not knowing exactly what has gone wrong, the deputy sheriff says to him, “It’s a real mess, ain’t it, sheriff?” Jones says, “If it ain’t, it will do until the real mess gets here”. Not knowing will often do as trouble enough, until the real trouble of knowing arrives.

When we begin to hear the call to adventure, the deeper trouble of knowing what is calling to us can really get us started, as we feel the traction as well as the tension of living into the myth brought on by the journey.

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice

As we tune more towards an inner voice, sensing the call to adventure awakening within us, we will at some point bump against the voices of those around us – people who matter to us, people whose opinions we have valued and perhaps sought out, and also particular people who annoy us by offering their unsolicited opinions about how we should choose to pursue our lives.

When we follow the path made ready by the soul, advice from another is mostly of no use. In the same way that following a path already made will have us following somebody else’s path, following another’s advice means that we’re not trusting our own inner source of life; we’re not following the more subtle energies of our own life force. When this is the case, our endeavors are not likely to bear much fruit nor take us very far, nor hold much personal meaning for us.

Another challenge, once we begin hearing the call from within, is how to not readily abandon it, and how to not keep comparing it with advice from someone else. How many times, when we don’t know what to do with our lives, do we ask someone to tell us what to do? It sets us up for a dynamic in which we become unwitting ‘help-rejecting complainers’. Tell me what to do, so I can either not do what you suggest, or else do it, and then complain about it when it doesn’t appear to be working.

The only advice that has seemed of use to me – when it comes to answering a call from the soul – is this sage advice I was once given: in matters of great importance, listen to my own heart, and follow what I find to be my own bliss. That doesn’t mean I don’t talk with others about it, or share it with those capable of understanding me or challenging me. But there is nothing else we can do, if we want meaning and vitality in our lives, but follow the inner rhythms and songs for our own authentic life.

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

If we follow a calling to become more alive, and more than what we already are, then we must inevitably move out beyond our comfort zone. As we start to cross the first threshold into the unknown, we take leave of ‘home’.

As we do, we are bound to feel inner dissonance, something that is going against the grain of the usual way. We start to feel the breach of the old boundaries as we go against our homeostatic nature; we hear the sound of an inner alarm. As soon as something starts to go wrong, or others question us or become upset with our movement, we may feel panic, doubt and fear.

We feel this old tug at our ankles, and our feet want to stop going forward. Here we find an ancient, reflexive desire to turn back, or a desperate need to return to the security that had brought forth a stagnant same-ness that felt fixed and constraining.

Here something crucial must become re-established in the psyche of the hero, in the one seeking more meaning and fulfillment in life. There must be a gradual and undeniable shift in allegiance to our most fundamental orientation to reality. In order to better heed the inner call to the awaiting adventure, we must shift from a security-seeking mode to a vitality-seeking mode.

To embrace the journey waiting to happen, we must make shift in consciousness – from the safety we have come to know (which must happen first), to the enlivening we desire with all our heart (which must come next).

Answering the call to adventure helps to do exactly that.

“Mend my life!”

each voice cried.

But you didn’t stop.

There is another obstacle that prevents us from being quietly pulled forward by that which brings us alive, and that which we truly love. This increase in energy and excitement can hard to get adjusted to.

As we feel our own life force energies begin to pour more through our sensate bodies in a direct and potent way, we tend to unconsciously defend against this in-flow of energy. We will commonly do it in a culturally sanctioned and approved way: We apply ourselves to fixing things – other people, the world around us, and of course, ourselves.

First we try to fix others. Many of us “givers” have devoted our lives to care-taking tasks. One day it strikes us how unfulfilling this may actually be. (This takes a while to realize.) We then turn our attention back to correcting ourselves, which can be a much more efficient and effective use of our energy and attention. Except that when we resort back to a mental ‘problem solving’ mode for matters of the heart, it doesn’t work, either.

We repeatedly chase our tails with mental thinking, or maybe better said, we chase after all of our problems, and think that if we can just fix them all, we will be more okay, if not more alive. Fixing problems rarely brings more aliveness, though; it simply provides temporary relief, until the next problem comes. And it certainly will come. This is the voice that says “Mend my life!” As a fixer, we can have a mission, a sense of purpose.

The deeper call –“Grow my life!” – lies buried beneath all of the surface repairs of a ‘just-fix-it’ mentality. The next threshold to be crossed is a letting go of mending everything, or mending anything, for that matter – so we can drop into deeper states of grounded awareness, beyond mental thinking and problem solving.

Here, we stumble upon a crucial and liberating insight about our world, and more importantly, about our selves. What if nothing is broken? Well now, what does someone do about that? New trouble.

At least, it will be a different kind of trouble; a better trouble, worth having. And as we let go of fixing we will find ourselves instead being led once again, right back to the unknown.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations-

though their melancholy

was terrible.

If we practice a deep listening long enough, and we aren’t looking just to find something in particular, like a lost object – and we instead start looking for what is already there waiting for us (and only us), we will have crossed over into the territory of the hero’s mythic realm of adventure.

We listen as a practice, simply for the sake of listening, in and of itself. To allow ourselves to hear, feel and sense what comes. If we stick with this approach, inevitably something begins to stand out into our awareness, with the potential for it to become enlivening. We will start to realize what you have to do to sustain this aliveness. It simply becomes obvious, and as well it’s often a surprise, all at the same time.

The trouble that can occur here is, we begin realizing that what we now feel like we have to do, isn’t what our pre-conceived ideas for our lives had been. We start to see that what we thought we had to do, what we endlessly tried to do or make happen, isn’t really the thing to do any more. This can lead us to one of those ‘oh, no’ moments of awakening, and this is often a big one to be faced

This is typically another threshold that has to be crossed: Letting go of the mind’s incessant demands, obligations, barters, deals, fretting, etc. Realizing that we have wasted our time, energy and resources trying to fix someone else or yourself, or hold something together, or fit into something that doesn’t really fit us any more.

We come face-to-face with the fact that something in our lives just doesn’t work. Perhaps it once did, or maybe it never did. But when we have invested ourselves in something that no longer bears fruit, or gives us life, and we know the truth of this -depending on your state of mind – this is really bad news, or else really good news.

If we listen to the deep calling from within us, we understand that we have to shed what no longer serves life, in order to be available to move towards that which gives new life. There is simply no way around this universal truth, no matter how many times we try to take this route. This awareness will bring on a necessary grief, and a deep sense of something being lost.

As we orient more and more towards a new way of sensing, feeling, and knowing what we have to do, we become more immersed in our own core. We can then become more able to move beyond all external sources of motivation, and become pulled by a persistent and steady inner energy source, like an inner compass heading.

Something just keep welling up from within, pointing us towards an unknown territory worth pursuing. This is how we are kept on track, kept enlivened, and kept close to our desire to move our lives in the only direction it can go – forward.

Being moved along by an inner yearning, however undefined or mysterious, requires us to move beyond the ‘stiff fingers’ of grasping that a rigidified ego holds, and past the fixed foundations of an old consciousness that appeals to our security-seeking bodies and minds, saying to us ‘fool, don’t leave what you know behind’!

And finally, in order to venture into new fields of play, we confront the vestiges of ‘terrible melancholy’ – an authentic mourning of something that will never be, and what could never be to begin with. Dis-illusion-ing. What Philip Slater called ‘a kind of mourning period for our fantasies’. Which of course is the only cure for an illusion.

So listening for the call to adventure requires us, at some point along the journey, to let go of a ‘stiff fingers’- our long held, illusions about safety and security. This is a necessary suffering, and a preparation for the new way – the way of adventure, and the way of mystery.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

Another obstacle that would hold us back from taking up the path of adventure is regret. Yet one more block would be chasing illusionary belief that it is too late for us, that we’ve missed our time, and the windows of opportunity have all closed for us.

We buy into the perception that we are too old, too uneducated, too broken, too poor, too much failure…well, you can name your own favored deficit or disadvantage. But this is just another wily defensive strategy, yet more clinging to an old and useless identification. These avoidance postures are also a likely indication that we must be getting closer to the source of the new wellspring, actually. Why else would we desperately resort back to these oldest of entrapments – ‘it’s too late’ and ‘I am not enough’.

So back to this essential reframing of the terrain – so what now, if nothing is broken, and it is not too late?

The call to adventure opens us towards our heart’s desires for eros, vitality and mystery. We all want rapture to somehow overtake us. We all yearn for the mystery to reveal itself to us in ongoing, curious-arousing, and surprising ways. We learn to accept that we cannot know the outcomes of meaningful adventures in advance. We learn that things of the soul are revealed to us in their own time as we journey forth, little by little.

little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice,

which you slowly recognized as your own

As we cross over those thresholds that prevent us from listening deeply, we come closer and closer towards an inner voice, one that has been there all along, waiting until we are ready to listen. Waiting so it can begin speaking from the silent, still space within the depths of our heart.

When we practice listening deeply what is authentic and true will gradually burn through clouds of confusion and despair. We begin to recognize a familiar, insistent messenger within us, pointing the way as it will, like a compass seeking north. This points us towards the sound our own true voice, and the feeling of aliveness from our own wellspring of vitality.

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

As long as we can practice the art of going inward and downward into the wellspring within, we can learn to listen deeply to what emerges. This inner voice can become a steadying companion through the trials and ordeals we face in life. We know what we have to do, simply because it feels more and more unbearable when we are not doing it.

Following our bliss, as Joseph Campbell often said, it is not self indulgent, it is essential. This life force energy, this sense of embodied presence, becomes a companion to us. It is reflected in our countenance, and in our ‘en-theos’, our ‘God-filled-ness’, our enthusiasm for life. It keeps us company as a silent and invisible companion, providing us with the impetus and the courage to go forth ever deeper and deeper into the world, giving what is alive in us to the world.

To summarize, we begin our journey by feeling a call coming from another realm. It summons us to step more and more into the manifest world. As we walk deeper into the physical world, we need our need to be more connected to the vital myth (ever near, ever ineffable) that echoes in the background of this world.

We then ‘walk between these two worlds’, and it is in this very ‘in between’ space that soul is cultivated, activated, ignited. None of us can say for sure exactly how or when this ignition will happen to us, but when and as it does, we become enlivened vessels – capable of becoming the embodiment of eternity’s zeal to incarnate in us. We become signposts to something beyond ourselves, living out our creative expressions in the field of time.

determined to do

the only thing you could do-

determined to save

the only life you could save.

As we stay in tune with to the call to adventure, we inevitably begin to gather an inner momentum, we feel more compelled to move forward in life, and we gain clarity from a powerful insight: There is only one life we can save, saved only by bringing forth what is within the self. The Gnostic gospels quote Jesus as saying, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

So let each of us, fellow travelers on this path of mythic adventure, listen deeply and closely to what is being whispered to our consciousness-seeking egos, from the inner depths of our souls. Each of us has to find a way to tune in, listen deeply, and feel what divine wind is blowing our way.

Again, this deep listening will inspire something to move in us. Then we let go of our more childish ego wishes and fantasies, in order to follow the call to venture forth towards our bliss. What else could human beings want to do?

In following the call to our bliss, Joseph Campbell said that doors would open for us that would not open before now, and would not open for any others. But in order for the doors to open for us, we will have to be authentically living into the myth of the heroic endeavor. Here is his reflection about this very matter, from Hero With a Thousand Faces:

“The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his (or her) spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of this society to a zone unknown. This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings,unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delights.”

The price to be paid for answering the call to adventure is having encounters that at some point also involve ordeals. But before facing these actual ordeals themselves, we must face the crossing of thresholds into the unknown, where the mythic terrains of adventure and ordeal await us.

For now, it is our time to listen deeply to the call coming from within, without expecting any particular kind of summons. Then we notice what comes…because another truth is –whatever you have been looking for, is already looking for you. So let’s be on the watch. Let each of us be open to surprising possibilities that have been waiting for our arrival.

It may be time to say ‘yes’ to life, and be taken by the soul on the journey of a lifetime.